[common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by
enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local
bulletin boards, Usenet, or other electronic media.
As the culture of the Internet has displaced the older BBS world, this term
has lost ground to both open source and
free software; it has increasingly tended to be
restricted to software distributed in binary rather than source-code form.
At one time, freeware was a trademark
of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program
PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and
presumed death in 1984. See shareware,
FRS.